This thread will be for announcing all the newest episodes of Ancient DOS Games as they are released. New episodes debut around the start of every 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Saturday of every month, Eastern Time, give or take a few hours depending on circumstances. ;)

Ancient DOS Games is a webshow I've started to bring to light all kinds of old DOS games from the 80's and 90's. I try not to be too critical of games in my reviews and instead focus on how the game is played, what works, what doesn't, how to obtain the game legally and how to get the game working best on modern computers using DOSBox.

Also, at the end of each episode is a hint as to what game will be covered in the next episode. The first three people who guess correctly get their names in the credits of the next episode! Make sure to send your guesses to adg@pixelships.com, otherwise they won't count!

Every fifth regular episode is followed by a filler where I just take a break and talk about some various aspect of gaming, sometimes DOS related, sometimes not!

No one guessed this week's episode, though one person got technically close by guessing Kiloblaster, which was released as freeware at the same time Xargon was. :P

While playing through the game for the review, I noticed that the actual final boss fight is easy if you buy some invulnerability for it, otherwise you will get slaughtered due to the unusual hit detection process in the game and the continual flood of respawning enemies. >_>;

Incidentally, the first volume (the one you didn't have to pay for originally) has the best ending.

I took a moment roughly halfway through to go over all the destruction moves in the game, since some of them are really difficult to perform and I felt it would be a good spectacle. ;)

When I was looking up the game's specs I had nearly forgotten that this was one of the first shareware games I had ever heard of becoming freeware. The game only actually stayed shareware for about 5 years, then, roughly around when Battlegrounds was announced, it was made free, meaning it's been free to get for about 11 years now, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.

Anywhoo, hope everyone enjoys this weekend's episode. Episode 20 is just around the corner too and it shall be epic!

Nice and interesting episode (as usual (; ). Strangely enough, I've hated the game when it came out. I think the last fighting games I've really enjoyed were International Karate and IK+ on the C64. Looks like I'm not cut out for learning complicated combos. And to be frank, I think the robot designs in OMF2097 look a bit silly. Anyway, I'd never have realized how many features the game has without watching this episode.

ADDiCT wrote:Nice and interesting episode (as usual (; ). Strangely enough, I've hated the game when it came out. I think the last fighting games I've really enjoyed were International Karate and IK+ on the C64. Looks like I'm not cut out for learning complicated combos. And to be frank, I think the robot designs in OMF2097 look a bit silly. Anyway, I'd never have realized how many features the game has without watching this episode.

It seems every time I look up information about OMF2097 I learn something new. I only covered a fraction of the features, though most of what was left amounted to selectable options and secrets. (Like the ability to change your character's three basic stats in the story mode! ;)

As for the whole complicated combo thing, OMF is actually pretty tame compared to many modern fighting games in terms of special moves. It's actually about on par with Street Fighter 2 in the way its special moves are presented.

And yeah, the robots do look silly... that's why they're made of win! If they were ultra-stylized they'd probably blend in too easily with other robot designs from other games, or even with each other.

Gemini000 wrote:As for the whole complicated combo thing, OMF is actually pretty tame compared to many modern fighting games in terms of special moves.

Agreed 100%!

OMF2097 was the first fighting game that got me interested in this genre... I was never into the Moral Kombat 'thang' and such, mostly because I found performing the special moves and such to be daunting.

Hehe, I was kicking the lil' kiddies butts on Epic's dialup challenge arena, this back when I was 34 years old... and if *I* (as an old fart) could keep up with those little kiddie finger twiddlers, you just know that the special moves and combos in OMF2097 couldn't be all that hard to begin with !

P.S. to All,

A Gravis Gamepad (the old gameport version) is good for about 1500+ rounds before you have to break out the old trusty screwdriver and Super Glue <grin>.

Although the episode is only 20 minutes long, I managed to pack a lot of stuff into it. First there's an unboxing, which I had to condense down to a slideshow unfortunately because the video compression got badly corrupted apart from the keyframes, but the audio was still OK. Then comes a review of the comic inside the manual for the game. Lastly, near the end of the video I do another quick comparison of the colours to see if the special dithering used in the EGA 640x200 mode actually works out better than in the original Thexder or not.

Remember to keep sending in your guesses and suggestions for each new episode! :)

OK, here's the steps I perform using the art program Paint Shop Pro. You should easily be able to adapt these steps to any program that has equivalent functions.

1. Get yourself a screenshot of any Game Arts game that uses this special dithering. A full screenshot that has been properly restretched will be exactly 640x400 pixels big and saved in a lossless format such as PNG, PCX, or BMP.

2. Increase the colour depth of the image to 24-bit.

3. Perform a gamma correction of 0.5 on all colour channels. (Effectively, halve the gamma.)

4. Resize the image to half of its horizontal resolution, making sure that pixels are appropriately blended in the process. (In PSP, the correct setting is "Smart Size".)

5. Resize the image back to its original resolution, but this time turn OFF any blending which would normally happen. (In PSP, the correct setting is "Pixel Resize".)

6. Perform a gamma correction of 2.0 on all colour channels. (Effectively, double the gamma back to where it's supposed to be.)

7. Reduce the colour depth of the image using an optimized octree and without dithering to find what colours are in use and how many there are. ;)

Paint Shop Pro also allows you to count how many colours are in use in an image, as well as count how many colours are within a selected region. To actually determine which colours were missing between the status bars and the gameplay I would make an additional image of just the gameplay, reduce its colour depth, then pick colours on the original image, switch to the gameplay image, and see if my colour selection was still valid, and if not, that colour was obviously missing from the gameplay.

Basically, I just go over all the display adapters used in DOS games and show some games which demonstrate each of them in some way.

Next Saturday, Ancient DOS Games resumes with Episode #21! ...darnit, I should've done a Blackjack game for it... actually, no, that would've been boring, unless it was like, EXTREME BLACKJACK DEATH DEMONS XXI ALPHA or something. ;D

Hm. Something seems wrong with this ep. Although the ads play fine, the actual video stops playing for a long time while buffering after 27 seconds and stops altogether after 2 minutes or so, just after the Tandy section begins... All the other eps play fine and my connection should be able to handle it just fine (at 120Mbps).